Could it be? The Church is Right About Confession?

Some people criticize the Church for the Sacrament of Confession. "Why confess to a man when you only need to confess to God?" (Because the Bible says to confess to one another.) "Where in the Bible did Jesus give His Apostles the power to forgive sins?" (When he breathed on them and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven and whose sins you retain are retained.") There are plenty of places to get good information on the Sacrament and why the Church has it.

Today, though, First Things magazine has an article about our culture's strong desire for Confession. There are websites and forums of all kinds built around confessing the sins of your life. If you just Google the word "confession" you get a slew of hits for sites where you can make an anonymous, yet public, confession. (There were a total of 18,400,000 sites found in my search, but some of these are actual informational sites on Catholicism while others are anti-Catholic sites that work to misinform people on the Church's Sacraments.)

But is the kind of confession that is happening really as good for the soul as the old-fashioned kind the Church gives (the capital "C" kind)?

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway examines how Confession contrasts with the kind of confession that is all over the place. My favorite part of the article was this snippet:

As Martin Luther said: “Now mark well what I have said often, that confession consists of two parts. The first is our work and doing, that I lament my sins and desire comfort and renewal of my soul. The other is a work which God does, who absolves me from my sins through His Word spoken by the mouth of man. This is the most important and precious part, as it also makes it lovely and comforting.”

Compare such a comment with the disclaimer that greets visitors to the Flamingo Road Church’s website: “By sending information to this website, the sender has granted Ivescrewedup.com a perpetual, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, distribute, and otherwise exercise all rights with respect to the information, at its sole discretion,” it says in part.

Be sure to go read the rest.